Fire

In this wind-ranging article, Venkatesh Rao discusses a number of things, including the unfolding Musk/DOGE coup. I’m ignoring that for the moment, as anything I write about it will be out of date by next week. The two parts I found most interesting from Rao’s piece were: (i) his comparison of people who tolerate inefficiency and interruption versus those who don’t, and (ii) his assertion that burnout comes from not being able to exercise integrity.

The two are related, I think. When you have to do things a particular way, subsuming your identity and values to someone else’s, it denies a core part of who you are as a person. While it’s relatively normal to self-censor to present oneself as a particular type of person, doing so in a way which is in conflict with your values is essentially a Jekyll/Hyde problem. And we all know what happened at the end of that story.

A big tell of whether you are an “open-door” type person is whether you tolerate a high degree of apparent inefficiency, interruption, and refractory periods of reflection that look like idleness. All are signs that your mental doors are open and are taking in new input. Especially dissenting input that can easily be interpreted as disloyal or traitorous by a loyalty-obsessed paranoid mind. Input that forces you to stop acting and switch to reflecting for a while.

Conversely, if you’re all about “efficiency” and a “maniacal sense of urgency” and a desperate belief that your “first principles” are all you need, you will eventually pay the price. A playbook that worked great once will stop working. Even the most powerful set of first principles that might be driving you will leave you with an exhausted paradigm and nowhere to go.

[…]

What truly burns people out is not that their boss is too demanding, hot-tempered, or even sadistic. What burns people out is not being allowed to exercise their integrity instincts. Being asked to turn off or delegate their moral compass to others. Plenty of people have the courage, the desperation, the ambition, or all three, to deal with demanding and scary bosses. But not many people can indefinitely suspend integrity instincts without being traumatized and burning out.

Source: Contraptions

Image: Danylo Suprun